Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (10 page)

During her time on the
Sandwich,
she had written to her parents and explained her situation. In 1767, she went to see them for the first time since she had left home at the age of nineteen. She told them all about her adventures, but unfortunately when she returned to Portsmouth, a friend of the family came to live in the town and let it be known that the shipwright's apprentice known as William Chandler was really a woman. The rumor rapidly spread around the dockyard, and some of the other apprentices wanted to examine her to discover the truth. She was saved by two of the shipwrights she had worked for. They took her aside, questioned her very seriously, and said that it would be better if she told them the truth rather than expose herself to the rudeness of the dockyard boys. Mary burst into tears and admitted that she was indeed a woman. They were astonished but swore to keep her secret. They assured the dockyard people that William was a man and pointed out that if he were a girl he would not have gone after so many women.

Mary qualified as a shipwright in the spring of 1770 and was duly awarded the certificate to confirm that she had completed her apprenticeship. Unhappily, after surviving six years at sea and seven years as an apprentice, she suffered another bout of rheumatoid arthritis that was so crippling she could scarcely walk. She recovered sufficiently to be able to return to work, but while helping to dismantle a 40-gun ship, she seriously strained herself and found that she could no longer cope with the physical demands of the job. She had no option but to leave the dockyard and apply to the Admiralty for a disability pension. Her case was examined, and on January 28, 1772, the Lords of the Admiralty agreed to her request. The following report must be one of the most unusual entries ever to appear in the volumes of Admiralty minutes:

A Petition was read from Mary Lacey [
sic
] setting forth that in the Year 1759 she disguised herself in Men's Cloaths and enter'd on board His Maj
^ts
Fleet, where having served til the end of the War, she bound herself apprentice to the Carpenter of the
Royal William
and having served Seven Years, then enter'd as a Shipwright in Portsmouth Yard where she has continued ever since; but that finding her health and constitution impaired by so laborious an Employment, she is obliged to give it up for the future, and therefore, praying some Allowance for her Support during the remainder of her life:
    Resolved, in consideration of the particular Circumstances attending this Woman's case, the truth of which has been attested by the Commissioner of the Yard at Portsmouth, that she be allowed a Pension equal to that granted to Superannuated Shipwrights.
¹²

This marked the end of Mary Lacy's life as William Chandler. Her autobiography ends abruptly with her meeting a Mr. Slade at Deptford who proposed marriage.

She had always planned to remain single but at length decided to accept his offer, convinced that the hand of Providence had brought them together. Her husband was sober and industrious, and the book concludes with Mary looking forward to enjoying the utmost happiness the married state affords. While the essential facts of Mary Lacy's story check out with contemporary documents, it seems likely that the tidy ending was provided by her publisher, who was happy to allow readers to be titillated by her lesbian flirtations but felt that the book must have a more traditional conclusion.

The adventures of William Brown, William Prothero, and Mary Lacy bring up a number of interesting questions. How many other women cross-dressed as men and went to sea in the great age of sail? How was it possible for them to fool their shipmates for so long when they were living in such close proximity? Why on earth would a woman want to run away from her home and family and put herself through the notorious hardships and dangers of life at sea? And why has the whole subject of cross-dressing women so fascinated people that fictional accounts of female sailors became best-sellers, sea chanties and ballads were written about them, and they even appeared in plays and melodramas on the London stage?

We will never know how many women went to sea as men because the only cases we have any evidence of are those in which the woman's sex was revealed and publicized in some way, or those cases where a woman left the sea and had her story published. There must have been many women who sailed as men whose sex was never discovered and who lived and died as anonymously as their sisters who never went to sea. Stark's research has revealed twenty cases of female sailors in the Royal Navy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that appear to be genuine and two accounts that are largely fictitious. Another fifteen cases of female sailors on board merchant vessels and fishing boats are recorded in newspaper articles, reports in the
Naval Chronicle,
and other sources, though the accuracy of these cannot be guaranteed. As there were up to 145,000 men in the Royal Navy in 1810, and some 120,000 men in the merchant navy at the same period, it is evident that female sailors were very rare indeed, and it is little wonder that when they were discovered their stories found their way into the newspapers.

What is striking about the genuine cases of female sailors is how they were able to fool the men on board for weeks, months, and in some cases, several years. On the face of it the women had an almost impossible task. Anyone who has been belowdecks on HMS
Victory
or the USS
Constitution
will recall the lack of headroom and the cramped conditions. The
Victory
and the
Constitution
were among the largest ships of their day, so that life on a more typical warship of, say, 74 guns was even more confined. The officers had the benefit of living in small cabins constructed of wood or canvas screens, but the ordinary seamen lived literally on top of each other in a low, cavernous space dominated by the rows of guns. The off-duty watch slept in hammocks suspended below the deck beams. A female sailor could find herself in a hammock with no more than a few inches separating her from the seamen snoring in the hammocks on either side of her. Below the hammocks, the seamen sat on their sea chests or lay on the deck with their backs against the gun carriages. For meals they gathered around temporary tables slung between the guns, usually six to a table or a mess. One of their number would fetch the food for the mess from the galley, and broth or salt beef would be shared among them and eaten out of wooden bowls.

A 74-gun ship had a crew of around 550 to 650 men, most of whom were crammed into the area in front of the quarterdeck, about half its 176-foot length. The stern of the ship was largely taken up by the captain's cabin, appropriately called the great cabin, and by the quarters and stores of the officers and warrant officers. Much of the remaining space that was not occupied by the guns was filled with anchor cable, spare sails, and pens containing an assortment of animals. Cows, goats, pigs, and chickens predominated but many sailors kept pets, and so the barking of dogs and the screeching of parrots and monkeys were added to the clucking of chickens and the lowing of cattle. Most ships also had several cats, whose job it was to keep down the population of rats that lurked in dark corners and ate their way through any food not firmly contained in barrels.

While life belowdecks was damp, dark, and reeking of tar, bilge water, and unwashed bodies, life on deck was equally forbidding in an entirely different way. There the female sailor was at the mercy of the boatswain's lash and the physical demands of sailing in all weathers. Even in light breezes, she must constantly haul on coarse ropes and climb aloft to handle the sails, but in heavy weather she must make her way across a heaving, slippery deck in driving rain and stinging clouds of salt spray. If called on to do so, she must clamber up the shrouds and out onto the yardarms that would be swinging in a slow, giddy arc backward and forward above the ocean. A missed foothold or handhold could mean a fall resulting in death or a crippling injury.

So how did a young woman cope with this? Most working-class women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were accustomed to a hard life that involved long hours and a great deal of physical labor so that, provided the female sailor was reasonably strong and fit, she would not have found most of the demands of the sailors' work beyond her. She obviously had to develop a head for heights, and this proved the undoing of at least one woman. Captain Malony was short of hands when his ship
Daedalus
put in to the port of St. Johns, New Brunswick, in 1835. He went to the local jail, and the governor supplied him with an apparently robust and able-bodied seaman who went by the name Thomas Hanford. The
Daedalus
had been at sea for some time when a gale blew up and all hands were sent aloft to reef the topsails. Thomas reluctantly climbed toward the mizzentop but there his courage failed him. He came down and confessed to the mate that he was a woman whose real name was Sarah Busker. The captain agreed that for the rest of the voyage to London she should work in the cabin as a servant. She had already made a previous voyage to Labrador on a fishing boat but now decided to give up further thoughts of the sea.
¹³

The sex of a female sailor named Rebecca Young was revealed in a tragic accident that came about because she was too confident of her ability to go aloft. She had spent two years sailing out of the Thames estuary on a hatch-boat. She went by the name Billy Bridle and dressed herself in a sailor's trousers, shirt, jacket, and neckerchief. One afternoon in June 1833, she challenged a man to climb the masthead with her, and after some hesitation he joined her at the maintop. She urged him to go higher, and they both climbed to the topmast crosstrees. After sitting there for a few minutes the man was called down. Five minutes later Rebecca followed, but in attempting to slide down the topgallant halyards, she burnt her hands so badly that she was forced to let go and fell twenty feet to the deck. She died on the spot, and an inquest held at the town hall in Gravesend a few days later returned a verdict of accidental death.
¹⁴

Most of the women who went to sea were able to cope with working aloft, and several excelled at it. We have already seen that William Brown was promoted to captain of the foretop, and Mary Ann Arnold, who served as a cabin boy on a number of merchant ships, was commended by her captain in 1839: “I have seen Miss Arnold among the first aloft to reef the mizen-top-gallant sail during a heavy gale in the Bay of Biscay.”
¹⁵
But however active and courageous these women may have been, they still had to look like men. Or did they?

The chief reason why women were so successful in fooling their shipmates was that they looked like adolescent boys. Every ship, whether naval or merchant, had several boys in the crew. Some were as young as nine or ten, and many were in their teens. The navy welcomed boys because they were quick and agile aloft, and they could be trained from a young age in the complexities of navigation and seamanship. Those training to be officers were often fully equipped to command a ship before the age of twenty, and an able seaman in his early twenties who had been at sea since he was a boy was a priceless asset on any ship. The clothes worn by sailors were ideal for disguising a woman's shape. They consisted of a loose shirt and a waistcoat or jacket, baggy trousers or petticoat-breeches, which were like culottes, and a handkerchief tied around the neck. Hair was often worn long and tied in a pigtail or a ponytail. All that was needed was to bind the breasts sufficiently for them to be hidden beneath the shirt, in the manner described by Mary Lacy and the fictitious Lucy Brewer. In 1849, the
Carlisle Journal
carried a report about a sailor named Ann Johnson, the daughter of George Johnson, a shoemaker who lived at 22 Oak Street in New York. While at sea she had gone aloft in the heaviest weather, and the report concluded, “Her appearance is said to be that of a good-looking boy of 16 or 17 years.”
¹⁶

The trickiest problem facing the female sailor every day was using the toilet facilities, which in most ships were extremely primitive. The seamen usually climbed over the sides onto the leeward channels and urinated into the sea, or they went forward to the heads. This was the name given to the platform at the bows that was built over the beakhead and behind the figurehead. There the seaman crouched over a hole to defecate or sat on a crude box with a hole in the top, called a “seat of easement.” Presumably most women would have gone to the heads rather than attempting to urinate over the sides, although there is evidence to show that some women who cross-dressed made use of a small funnel of horn or metal to assist them.
¹⁷

The subject of menstruation is not mentioned in any of the accounts of female sailors, but women historians have suggested that this might not have been such a problem. One theory is that the young women on board ship lived such ferociously active lives that, like modern athletes in training today, they may have ceased to have periods. In the case of prepubescent girls, the hard life and poor diet could have delayed the onset of puberty for several years. Another theory is that so many seamen suffered from a range of diseases and ailments including piles and gonorrhea that they were not likely to comment on one of their number having bloodstained clothing on occasion.

Which brings us to the question of why a woman would want to go to sea dressed as a man. The traditional reason, and the one made popular in numerous ballads, was that women went to sea to join their sailor lovers. We have already seen it suggested that the young woman known as William Prothero followed her lover to sea. So did the seventeen-year-old Margaret Thompson, who left her uncle's home in London in 1781 and joined the navy under the name George Thompson. She revealed that she was a woman when she was blamed for a theft and condemned to be flogged. When asked by the captain why she had taken the extraordinary step of going to sea disguised as a man she said it was “to see her sweetheart, who quitted England three years since, and is now resident at Bombay.”
¹⁸
Hannah Snell is said to have married a Dutch sailor and followed him to sea. And according to the
History of the Pirates
by Captain Charles Johnson, the pirate Anne Bonny left her father's house in the Carolinas and ran away to sea with a feckless sailor. Perhaps these and others were prompted to go to sea because of love affairs, but the evidence suggests that most of the women who went to sea disguised as men did so for hard economic reasons or because they wished to escape from something in their past.